ARTS
Closing the Door on an Opportunity
Car Seat Headrest’s latest squanders Will Toledo’s promise
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Out gay singer/ songwriter Will Toledo
released 11 albums under the name
Car Seat Headrest, playing all the
instruments on them, from 2010 to
2015. While attending college in Virginia, he
dropped them on Bandcamp, slowly building
up a following. He murmured songs like “Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Fag” and “Heartless
Dick” into a four-track recorder from the
back seat of a car (which led to the project’s
name). This underground buzz led to a deal
with Matador Records.
Once Toledo had access to a wider audience
and a real recording budget, he returned to some
of his older songs on “Teens of Style.” Car Seat
Headrest became an actual band, fl eshed out
by guitarist Ethan Ives, bassist Seth Dalby, and
drummer Andrew Katz (and several additional
touring members). But until now, the band has
only recorded one album of new songs for Matador,
“Teens of Denial.” It mixed infl uences from
their ‘90s precursors at the label (especially
Guided By Voices) with emo and classic rock.
The band’s impulse to make themselves small
had disappeared. Instead, Toledo engaged in
long-form storytelling like “(Joe Gets Kicked
Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends
(But Says This Isn’t A Problem),” which spends
fi ve and a half minutes describing a teenager’s
bad trip.
Then the band re-recorded the 2011 “Twin
Two Black Gay Men Win Pulitzers
Jericho Brown, Michael R. Jackson awarded in poetry, drama
BY MATT TRACY
Two Black gay men whose
work has centered on intersecting
themes of LGBTQ
and racial identities
earned Pulitzer Prizes on May 4.
Jericho Brown landed the Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry thanks to his
poetry collection “The Tradition,”
while Michael R. Jackson’s play “A
Strange Loop” earned him a Pulitzer
Prize for Drama.
“A Strange Loop” is a semi-autobiographical
musical about a gay
Black writer navigating a lonely,
straight, and white world, who has
CARLOS CRUZ
“Making a Door Less Open” is the new album from Car Seat Headrest
— singer/ songwriter Will Toledo, guitarist Ethan Ives, bassist
Seth Dalby, and drummer Andrew Katz.
Fantasy,” a concept album about a young man
and his older male lover. It’s taken four years
to get a real follow-up to “Teens of Denial.” The
“Car Seat Headrest are going to save rock’n’roll”
hype the band received in the mid-2010s has
died down. “Making a Door Less Open” makes
a predictable step, embracing a more electronic
sound. Car Seat Headrest recorded two versions,
one with live instruments and one with
electronics, and decided to mix the two together.
But the album’s mix and production are still
full of homemade weirdness.
been urged to write a Tyler Perrylike
play while surrounded by six
Black queer actors.
“Never in my wildest dreams,”
Jackson wrote on Twitter in reaction
to the news that he won a Pulitzer.
“NEVER. IN MY. WILDEST.
DREAMS. Thank you to everyone
who has supported me on my journey
to such an incredible honor.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say once
I’ve caught my breath and looked at
all these text messages and emails
but for now, THANK YOU.”
Brown’s “The Tradition” touches
on sexuality and race, as well as
historical narratives, and in the
The band is not afraid to sound cringey. It’s a
shame that “Making a Door Less Open” sounds
like a demo from a group that still hasn’t worked
out how to change its style. They’re drawing
heavily on Toledo and Katz’s side project 1 Trait
Danger. Tellingly, Toledo sings about the pressures
of making this album on “Deadlines.”
“Twin Fantasy” was based on Toledo’s own
life, but he is now playing a character called
Trait rather than writing about his own experiences.
“Hollywood” has proven to be the
album’s most popular advance single. Toledo
talk-sings a diatribe against the corruption of
Tinseltown, relating his increasing disgust as
he takes a subway ride. The chorus “Hollywood
makes me want to puke” sounds like something
a 16-year-old fronting a punk band would come
up with. And the vocals and arrangement turn
screechy, canceling out its strengths. The lyrics’
aim at the fi lm industry’s exploitation of young
people’s dreams holds a degree of righteous anger,
but the song is a mess.
When “Weightlifters” begins with an extended
drone over a faint drumbeat, it signals that
we’re not in for a repeat of “Teens of Style.” The
song is based around a synthesizer loop that
wanders as though as it’s going in and out of
tune, even if Toledo’s vocals bring back a fairly
classical sense of craft. When Toledo sings,
“Music blasts through the market/ It’s the
sound of machines,” he could be talking about
process Brown encourages readers
to think critically for themselves
and question whether existing traditions
are worth perpetuating.
Speaking about “The Tradition”
and his work in a 2018 conversation
with Michael Dumanis of Bennington
Review, Brown said, “I feel
like a person who is hard to understand,
given our clichés and stereotypes
about people. So I wanted
a form that in my head was black
and queer and Southern.”
Brown met the Pulitzer news
with some humor, writing in a
tweet, “I mean… I dunno… you
have to admit, ‘Black queer men
➤ CAR SEAT HEADREST, continued on p.29
win the Pulitzer for poetry and
drama’ is a pretty funny sentence,
right?”
Brown, who teaches at Emory
University and lives in Atlanta,
has also received recognition for
other works, including his fi rst
book, “Please,” for which he won
the American Book Award. He also
won the Thom Gunn Award for
Gay Poetry for his work on “The
New Testament.”
Jackson, who lives in New York,
earned an MFA in Musical Theater
Writing at NYU’. “A Strange Loop”
premiered at Manhattan’s Playwrights
Horizons last year.
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